Fresno County's Mussel Slough Shootout Revisited in New Opinion Column

A weather-beaten plaque on 14th Avenue in Kings County near Hanford marks the site where, in 1880, settlers and Southern Pacific Railroad agents traded gunfire in a confrontation that columnist Joe Mathews now calls "the massacre that birthed modern California." His opinion piece, published March 19 on GV Wire, argues that the episode has been deliberately forgotten and that its lessons about federal power are more urgent than ever.

The dispute that triggered the Mussel Slough shootout began as a real estate arrangement that was, at the time, standard practice. The Southern Pacific Railroad allowed settlers to build homes on railroad land near the slough, a waterway 30 miles south of Fresno, with the expectation that they could purchase the land once the railroad route was finalized. When Southern Pacific raised the prices, settlers who included migrants, Civil War refugees, and land speculators refused to pay and refused to leave. The railroad responded by sending agents to evict them, including at least one U.S. marshal. The settlers resisted. The details of what followed, Mathews writes, are still contested.

The column, which runs under the Connecting California banner that Mathews writes for Zócalo Public Square, frames the 1880 confrontation not as isolated frontier history but as a template for what he characterizes as a recurring federal posture. "They don't want us remembering Mussel Slough," he writes, "because it would teach us that the U.S. government's attacks against Californians are not some Trump-era anomaly. They don't want us to remember that the feds always take the side of a powerful industry against the citizenry. And never stop trying to blame regular people for the government's own violence."

Mathews described visiting the marker himself: pulling off into the dirt while cars sped past just feet away, finding little water left in the slough itself, and learning nothing from the plaque about the episode's deeper implications. "Unfortunately, you learn nothing of this at the Mussel Slough site, as I did recently," he wrote.

The piece closes with an appeal that blends historical memory and contemporary politics: "But there is still plenty of blood in the old story, and no shortage of courage in us. Fight the Power! Remember Mussel Slough!"

The historical marker on 14th Avenue in Kings County near Hanford remains the only public commemoration of the 1880 event at the site itself.